The Personality Puzzle

Seventh Edition

The Personality Puzzle continues to lead the market by captivating students with David Funder’s fresh, masterful writing. New material on important research areas such as development and health, streamlined presentation of methods and assessment, and added data graphics presented in a stunning new full-color design make the Seventh Edition an even richer teaching tool.

Expanded and updated coverage of personality development

The Personality Puzzle features a brand new chapter that consolidates the latest research about how we become who we are. Topics addressed in Chapter 7 include the childhood roots of adult personality, personality change over the lifespan, transactions between personality and the environment, and the potential for personality change.

Updated coverage of physical and mental health

The Seventh Edition thoroughly explores the relationship between personality and mental as well as physical health. Funder updates the coverage of personality disorders in Chapter 17, including the new “dimensional” organization of disorders introduced in the DSM-5. The chapter also covers research on the relations between personality and health, summarizes the interesting history of the outdated theory that Type A personalities are prone to heart disease, and presents exciting contemporary research on the associations between personality traits, physical well-being, and longevity.

Integrated treatment of research methods and personality assessment

The text’s introduction to research methods and basic concepts—including reliability, validity, and generalizability—are now seamlessly integrated with the fundamentals of personality testing, illuminating how basic methodological concepts are applied in personality assessment. The Seventh Edition offers one chapter on research methods (Chapter 2) and one chapter on personality assessment (Chapter 3)—previous editions mixed this material across three chapters—to make the information easier to teach and learn.

Expanded data graphics in a new, full-color design

A bold new art program includes added data graphics and a beautiful full-color design. These additional, colorful graphics offer visual learners more opportunities to engage with the data, making the text more useful to instructors and approachable to students than ever before.

Chapter 1: The Study of the Person

Part I: The Science of Personality: Methods and AssessmentChapter 2: Personality Research MethodsChapter 3: Assessment, Effect Size, and Ethics

Part III: The Mind and the Body: Biological Approaches to PersonalityChapter 8: The Anatomy and Physiology of PersonalityChapter 9: The Inheritance of Personality: Behavioral Genetics and Evolutionary Psychology

Part IV: The Hidden World of the Mind: The Psychoanalytic ApproachChapter 10: Basics of PsychoanalysisChapter 11: Psychoanalysis After Freud: Neo-Freudians, Object Relations, and Current Research

Part V: Experience and Awareness: Humanistic and Cross-Cultural PsychologyChapter 12: Experience, Existence, and the Meaning of Life: Humanistic and Positive PsychologyChapter 13: Cultural Variation in Experience, Behavior, and Personality

Part VI: What Personality Does: Learning, Thinking, Feeling, and KnowingChapter 14: Learning to Be a Person: Behaviorism and the Social Learning TheoriesChapter 15: Personality Processes: Perception, Thought, Motivation, and EmotionChapter 16: The Self: What You Know About YouChapter 17: Personality, Mental Health, and Physical Health